Bestselling Scottish crime author

WHISKY IN THE JAR – back to square one

So… I have this process where I send my “finished” drafts to alpha readers (this is similar to software development, where you have alpha testing by a very small group of people and then a wider beta test) and they should destroy the work. This is very different to final proof reading and is more about checking that my story is good, what stupid mistakes I’ve made and so on.

I had been hoping to publish WHISKY IN THE JAR next week (19-Nov) but the feedback for it is not great… Not enough humour, the ending is a bit rushed and generally it’s all very rushed.

So, I’m being brave and taking it back to the drawing board. I’ve got a load of ideas based on some work today and I’m replotting the whole thing. Looking through it, it is rushed and lots of the details aren’t followed through on. It was an experiment in using Scrivener and it showed a lot of the power of that tool – but it also showed that I need to plot things out properly beforehand and Scrivener isn’t the tool for that. That said, Literature and Latte (the guys behind Scrivener) have releaseda beta of Scapple, a sort of free-form ideas tool, similar to a mind-map but more right-brain and less hierarchical (I do still see a valid use for Mindmap programs). I’ve been using that to structure my thoughts before I rearrange the manuscript.

Bear in mind that WHISKY started life as a short story of 3,000 words and is now a novella of 27,000 words – and DEVIL went from 22,000 to 105,000 – you can see where this is going… WHISKY is likely to be uplifted from novella 2.1 to book 3…

I’ll have to put the release of this one back – I should be able to get it out for a little Xmas present to yourselves, say 19-Dec-12. It does mean that I won’t be starting DYED IN THE WOOL for a wee while, though it does have the benefit of 1) the ideas in DYED can percolate a bit and I can take pressure off of that, while still maintaining April as a release date, and 2) you’ll get a proper book with much good quality. Christ knows what I’ll do with ALL IN A NAME, though…